The Drip
by Cead
Summary: Modern AU: After Merlin and Arthur have a messy break-up, Merlin is surprised to find sanctuary in an old coffee shop and an old friend. Merlin/Arthur, Merlin/Freya


'Come on…'

Merlin slid another cold silver coin into the payphone slot and waited nervously, skipping from foot to foot, drumming his pale shaking fingers on the black plastic box, desperately longing for the ringing in his ear to be replaced by a human voice rather than the cool mechanical monotone that had greeted him emotionlessly for the past fifteen minutes. But not just any human voice. Not Lance, or Will, or Percy, or any other of their stupid friends that Arthur might have called out to for support. He needed Arthur to answer. Even if it was just a word.

The rain drummed along on the dirt speckled glass. 'This number is currently unable to take your call-'

Merlin slammed the receiver down back onto the hook with an anguished moan. His vision started to blur, and he felt something wet and cold leave a snail trial as it ran down his cheek. It wasn't until it rolled down slowly onto his trembling lip and tasted salt that he realised he was crying. There was a twisting pain in his chest, both sharp and dull at the same time, as if something was gripping him from the inside and trying to ring out his tears like you would a wash cloth. He ran his hand through his dripping hair before cramming it back in his jacket pocket to search for another coin. All he found was a ten pound note.

He craned his neck over his shoulder and saw a small, warm-looking café directly behind him. Merlin looked at the rain hammering down on the pavement, bit his lip, and damned the consequences. He hauled his jacket over his head and threw open the door. Immediately he was hit by the downpour from above. Each droplet felt like it was made of stone rather than water, and the wind whipped it into a fevered frenzy, freezing his body through his thin, poorly thought out choice of a shirt.

The heat of the café embraced him with open arms. He shut the door behind him and almost melted in the atmosphere. It was so normal, so distant to the world he had just forced shut behind him that he couldn't help relaxing a little. He joined the queue and wiped all emotion from his face - this was London, you weren't allowed to be show feelings, it made you look too human.

The queue bumbled along quietly in the usual fashion. No eye contact, save for the annoying preteen couple that should probably be in school right now but were willing to skip maths for the sake of 'young love'. No interaction. Just staring at the board above the counters, selecting their caffeinated poison for the morning (they would all claim of course that they chose for the taste, but in a place like this, it was easy to tell that the majority of the queue were focused almost entirely on the prices).

That was why the burning glares of suspicion and curiosity began to burn in the back of his head when he reached the counter. He was unable to speak for a moment, and unable to contain both his smile and his surprise when his eyes met those of the barista girl waiting to serve him. Her familiar black hair was tied back in a messy ponytail that reminded him of their first meeting - on a street in a small village, where he had seen her hours before, and had been unable to forget her face since.

'Freya,' he muttered. Her pale lip trembled.

'Merlin.'

It was definitely her voice. The force of the memory's vivacity and the fresh sound of it in that moment nearly bowled him over. He had to grip a hold of the counter to keep himself upright.

'I had no idea you were in London,' Merlin said with a small smile.

She was frozen for a moment - during which the entire queue behind him breathed a singular sigh of exasperation at the wait - and then said in a small whisper with a grin, 'We can't really do this just now.'

Merlin helplessly held out the soggy tenner. 'Can I get some change for the payphone?' He had never sounded so foolish, or at least never felt it.

Freya widened her smile, and said, 'Sorry, you'd have to buy something. Company policy or something.'

'Oh.'

Merlin scanned the coffee board again, this time actually paying attention to the words rather than just looking at them. He could feel the agitation building behind him.

Freya leaned across the counter. 'Tell you what,' she said with a purr in her words, 'why don't you use our phone?'

'Really? Wow, em, thanks,' he stammered out. She beckoned him round to the back of the shop and to a black wall-mounted phone. She handed him the receiver just as a rather rotund, rather bald, rather red-faced man with a less than pleasant appearance in every manner turned the corner and clapped his bloodshot eyes on them both.

'Freeey-aaa!' he bellowed with a raspy voice, betraying his chain-smoking (as if his smell and yellow nails didn't already). She turned sheepishly towards him, but managed to look him in the eyes. 'I thought I warned you about bunking off! My office - NOW!'

There was the distant sound of shouting mingling with the answering machine voice as Merlin tried desperately to get Arthur to answer the phone. Then, having decided that enough was enough, that Arthur was obviously either at a friend's house, the pub, or just not answering to anyone in his usual tantrum way, and that he had probably increased the café's phone bill by more than all of the coffee in the shop was worth, Merlin weaved his way back to the front of the café. He was on his way to leave when he saw Freya sat at a table by the window with two coffees. She saw him and called him over.

'Isn't your boss going to get pissed if you waste your time with me?' he said as he sat down.

Freya shrugged and gazed at the window and the streaks of rain rattling against the glass. 'Not really. He isn't my boss anymore. I quit ten minutes ago. I'm staying 'till the end of my shift - mainly because I can't be bothered getting the tube and my bus isn't for another hour - , but I genuinely couldn't give a shit about this dump anymore.' She took a sip from her cup, but was repulsed and set it down again. 'I don't know why I keep drinking this crap. It's not even worth half of what you pay for.'

Merlin wrapped his hands around the second coffee, loathe to drink it but unwilling to seem rude or ungrateful. He raised it with dread to his lips - and believed her the instant the smell hit his nostrils. He set it down again without even taking a sip.

'You look rough,' Freya said without turning her head. Merlin caught a glance of himself in the window's reflection. He couldn't deny it. The hours of screaming, crying, more screaming, and then weeping had taken their toll. His eyes were rough and bloodshot, and his hair was in that god-awful in-between stage of wetness and dry during which it is remarkably difference to tell whether it is damp or just greasy. His hands and cheeks were pale and clammy, and his red was just the wrong shade of red to not consider the possibility of an oncoming cold.

'You don't look too good yourself, you know,' he muttered.

She smiled again. With the rain outside the window reflected on her face, she smiled. 'I just quit my job. The only way to pay my rent, and the only thing keeping me from having to either live on the streets or crawl back to my absolute bitch of a mother. Well, except from…' she trailed off, staring down into the hazel abyss of her latte. She sighed, and then blinked hard, lifted her head up, and met his eyes. He saw her unfinished thought fade in her gaze. 'What's your excuse?' she asked.

'I think I may have just broken up with my boyfriend,' he admitted.

She looked at him incredulously. 'You _think_ you have?' she exclaimed.

His eyes darted around the room as he tried to formulate the situation into words. 'Well, I don't _know_ if we have…ended things. Neither of us actually said we were done, but…I don't think it's safe to go back home for a while.' He paused, but Freya hung on his words, which pressed him to go on. 'There was a lot of shouting. It wasn't even about anything important, it just got out of hand and-'

The rest of the sound was muffled as Freya was suddenly hugging him, and his head was buried in her shoulder. He hadn't even noticed her getting up, which was probably because he hadn't noticed his vision blur from tears (which he thought by now he had run out of by now) or his voice croak as his pain began to strangle him from the inside.

He ended up at Freya's apartment on the very fringes of London after the coffee shop closed. He had considered the possibility of staying at Gwaine's house or Will's, but even the tiniest of odds that Arthur could be there turned the notions sour. Freya's however was safe.

But it did not stop him from imagining, as they ascended the never-ending staircase that led to her box room flat, that Arthur would be standing outside the door in wait, another vodka bottle in his hand, waiting to unleash the drunken anger that Merlin knew so well. There was an unforgiving fear in his stomach, itching at his heart, but it didn't stop him deflating slightly when there was only the next door neighbour's hairless cat waiting for them on Freya's doormat.

Freya turned the key in the lock, told him to ignore the mess (she had designed it specifically to repel visitors, she said), and opened the door, standing aside to let Merlin enter first. From what she had been telling him about her living conditions, he had expected the door to reveal mountain ranges of junk mail, bills, newspapers, bin bags, and other assorted crap. Instead, her hallway, although admittedly rather pokey, was practically immaculate. And when he entered the living room, well he practically fell in love…

The walls were lined with book shelf upon book shelf, which were each lined with book upon book, story upon story, bliss upon bliss. There was no television, just a rickety old study desk with a laptop, an empty mug, and a not-so-delicate sprinkling of assorted papers. In the corner, there was a perfectly kept Japanese peace lily in a less than perfectly kept pot. The carpet was worn, but clean, and the view from this high up the block provided the perfect wallpaper where the windows provided a break in Freya's hanging library.

'I'll get you a cup of real coffee, yeah?' she said, taking Merlin's coat from his shock-suspended arms. Merlin scanned the array of titles in her absence - Austen, Green, Blake, Wilde, Poe...He almost fainted in joy. He heard the whistle of the kettle through in the kitchen. He tore his eyes from the book spines, and they fell in good fortune upon the hodgepodge of papers on Freya's desk. He picked up the nearest page:

_White dust, illuminated by silver moonlight, fell down on the abandoned jade pendulum as it rocked on the window sill. All was quiet._

_The pendulum swayed from side to side on its hook, brushing lightly against the tiny clay pot overflowing with lavender without a sound. The inky shadow of the pot spilled over onto the oak apothecary table below, sheltering its deep scratches from the embarrassment of exposure. The escaped scent of jasmine and rosemary snaked out of the drawers and began swirling in the still air. It crept onto the floor and slithered across to the sleeping figure that lay snoring on the floor. The figure barely stirred. _

_If you had been a mouse or other small animal in that small cottage in Bellvale, a small and seemingly insignificant village in the Westborough district of Norantuur, you would have felt the breath of bitter wind creep in through the glassless window, felt your fur stand on end, and seen the jade charm beginning to glow almost as if another moon had begun shining inside of it._

It wasn't from any story he had read or heard of before, so he could only assume she had written it herself. And it was good. Intriguing, curious, and most definitely worth continuing. He rifled around for the second page.

Freya returned with two mugs of instant coffee, one of which was chipped around the rim. She almost dropped them when she clapped eyes on Merlin holding the paper in his hands. She hastily threw them down on a makeshift coffee table and ran at him, snatching the page from his hand.

'You're a writer?' he asked, watching her face turn from ghastly pale to deeply rooted rhubarb. She nodded feebly as she set to work gathering her work into a hideable pile. Merlin leaned over her shoulder to catch snippets of the story. 'Is this what you're working on?'

'Well, yes and no. I'm thinking about scrapping it. No, I am, I am most definitely…scrapping it.'

'Why?' He suddenly grew very defensive over the story, and wanted nothing more than to grab it out of her hands and run away with it. Freya seemed to deflate slightly after sliding the papers into a yellow folder and propping it up on the open laptop screen.

'If you want the truth,' she said, 'it was meant to be a love story. But then I realised I know nothing about love. I'm at something of a dead end.' She picked up the mugs and handed him one. They sat down on her tattered couch.

He was about to say that it's not that difficult to know about it, but something stopped him, and upon evaluating the remark he retracted it. It simply wasn't true. 'I don't think anyone knows anything about love,' he said, 'not truly.'

'Perhaps.' There was a long silence between them, which Merlin spent staring at the rows of books and wondering if it was actually possible that Freya could have actually read all of them or if she had in fact robbed every library in England. All the while, it felt like her eyes were upon him, but when he turned to look, she was doing the exact same at he was.

But of course, silences don't last, and as usual, Freya was the one to break it.

'How long has it been since we last saw each other?' she wondered aloud. Merlin thought it over.

'Well, we graduated in 2005, but then there was that time in Corfu in '08, so I suppose it's been about five years.'

'And yet here you are again. Just when I thought I'd gotten rid of you.' They shared a grin at that, but the smiles soon faded.

'So,' she said, 'in five years, I've gone from BA Honours in Literature to waitressing in a coffee shop. I'm still alone, I'm still in- or, rather, I was in – a crappy job that I hate, and the only difference is that I know have thirty years worth of debt-repaying ahead of me. How has life been for you?'

Merlin looked down into his cup, but realised there was nothing left inside to look at. He was forced to look at her instead. 'If you want to start that story, we're going to need more tea.'


End file.
